Sunday, April 01, 2012

Its a lazy Sunday morning and I was just sitting at home, having a cup of tea with Sunday Times. My roomie turned the television on among all crappy Sunday morning shows, one thing noticed my attention - All new online lifestyle store: JABONG.COM!

Lot of things have been written about current and future shape of e-commerce in India, and this subject being one of my favorite, I decided to do some 'khufiapanti'! While TV ad seems quite boring and uninteresting, they have managed to create a good looking product. Lot of options and filters to choose product of your choice. Messaging is simple: Free Shipping, Cash on Delivery, 30 day return policy and Free Hotline! Enough to excite an Indian online buyer.

Then I decided to go more deeper and check out some other facts about site. Name 'Jabong' means a tropical fruit. Neither logo, nor anything on site relates to Jabong fruit btw! I don't even know how many Indians would be knowing about this strange name. This led me to check traffic on site, and here are some interesting facts:

Alexa traffic rank: 119 in India (now that's impressive!)

1.6 Mn Unique visitors / month

8.2 Mn page views

More than 6 page views / visit

Some images for better understanding of traffic on site:

Site page views:

Site traffic details from Google Ad Planner:

Visitor Demographics (Alexa):

Well, everything is interesting about site traffic, isn't it? A lesser known weird name, in highly cluttered e-commerce market generates so much of traffic. I was surprised. I decided to check how much of this could be organic. I went on to check popularity of site on Google's organic search and found this:

'Jabong.com' is even lesser popular and generates approx 1000 queries on Google

I could not figure out exact % of organic traffic, but its clear that name 'Jabong' is not popular among people and visitors do not search for 'Jabong' on Google. So, where do they come from?

Well, here is a possible answer: Social Media!

I went on to check social presence of Jabong, and it was a sweet surprise!

Staggering 192,138 'likes' on facebook!! However, none of those is my friend :-(

11232 followers on Twitter! Btw, none of these followers in my network, again!

This brand is definitely doing some wonders on social media! Its kind of silent penetration which nobody noticed till date. I also checked if Jabong has been covered by news portals. Google News search throws only 4 relevant news items, most of which including ET, Hindu Business Line and Tech Crunch covers Jabong as just another e-commerce portal. So, Where does this site get traffic from? Paid promotions?? May be.

This led me to check origin of site and and a quick whois check revealed that domain was created in 2004 and last updated on 9th feb 2012. Even traffic data shows minimal traffic before february. So, its clear that site started operating only in february. Now, if that's the case - getting 8.2mn page views within 2 months is a huge success!

I also landed on this linkedin page, clearly suggesting they launched site 2-3 months back:

Now I strongly feel that getting such numbers organically in 2 months is highly difficult... and if you get it, you must get covered by all technology blogs and news media for sure! Question is why isn't anyone talking about it?

Also, here is an interesting finding. Google search of 'jabong' results shows a negative review on mouthshut on first page of results (written just one day ago). mouthshut.com shows overall rating of 1 star, out of 4 ratings. People talk about poor service and bad experience.

So, site's quality and 'look n feel' is nice. Site traffic is impressive and growing exponentially. It has managed to get huge numbers on Social Media profiles as well! However, some facts and figures shows different picture. Also, their huge TV advertising campaign is supported by online campaign and that should be driving traffic for the moment.

It will be interesting to see how Jabong.com fares in long run. E-commerce is game of trust service and quality. Jabong.com has a long mile to catch up on these factors. While flipkart, ebay, snapdeal and infibeam of the world are enjoying leadership position, I would love to see how Jabong differentiates and establishes its connect with consumers. Surely, there is a market for everyone and its up to Jabong.com to leverage potential of it.